They’re all coming for Christmas Dinner!

Continuing with my easy and  ‘low-cost to make and on postage costs’  Christmas Cards, – made using Card-io Stamps, stamp ink pads and a bit of imagination.  Today we’re feeding the birds their Christmas Dinner.

All the photographs can be enlarged by clicking on them – but don’t forget to click ‘back’ to come back to this page to carry on reading!

I love this card as it has some humour built into it somehow.  It makes me smile when I look at it.

To make:  I began stamping the garland towards the top of the card,  using a twiggy stamp,  and a berry stamp – to which I added a little red by colouring over the berries with a fine tipped red Staedtler pen.

Then I ripped a sheet of cheap copy paper in a wiggly but straight(ish) line and angled it on top of the card in the place where I wanted a snow-covered hillside in the background  to be.   Using three colours of Versa Color ink pads I ‘made’ the sunset  by blending first the lightest yellow colour, using a cheap cosmetic sponge – over the edge of the torn paper.   I then added a soft shade of yellowy orange to the centre – blending it outwards so that the colour began to graduate.  Finally I added a tiny touch of a deep warm shade of orange, again blending outwards so that there were no ‘edges’ to the three colours, but a warm glow.  Voila!  A sunset.

To make the blue sky over to the left hand side of the card, I did the exact same thing as making the sunset – simply blending (this time) two colours of blue.

Next came the sentiment closely followed by stamping the bird houses/feeders.   I added the trees in the background, and birds on the bird boxes, individually.

I ‘framed’ the whole  scene by hand drawing a pair of wiggly, barbed,  lines around the edge of the card.

Then came the fun stuff …  the Snow!

I took this photo at an ‘odd’ angle so that I could capture the snow to show you where it was.  I used Pinflair glue, and added Pinflair Snow Dust to make the snow on the hillside, and on the tops of the bird houses/feeders;   around the bottom of the post on the one bird house/feeder and along the ledges.

I also added more ‘snow’ by using a Graph It marker in white.  Using it as ‘snow falling from the sky’ by dotting carefully and gently over the scene, and also adding little strokes to the garland so that it looked like snow had collected on some of the twigs.

And that, as they say, is all there is to it!

I really enjoyed the making of this card, it came together so quickly and was such fun.  (I was watching Judge Judy at the time – so I’m astounded it turned out well at all.  Judge Judy is SO acerbic and caustic, she has me hooting with laughter.    I’m quite sure that I’d get it in the neck from her for doing that – so please don’t anyone tell her or she’ll ground me for a week!  LOL)

Whilst I’ve got your attention:  those of you who were waiting for my ‘Craft Product I Recommend’ blog post about Card-io Stamps – it is in the pipeline, and there is a reason that it’s not on the blog here yet, which you’ll find out about when I actually post it.

Thank you so much for visiting and staying with me for a while.  I SO enjoy your company.  I always feel like you’ve come and joined me at my kitchen table, and shared a coffee with me while we’ve had a good ol’ chat and a few giggles about crafting.  Perfick!    (lovers of Pop Larkin;  author H.E. Bates;  Darling Buds of May, will ‘get’ that word:     →  but for those who haven’t got the foggiest notion of what I’m talking about – replace ‘perfick’ with ‘perfect’).  😀

Have a truly magnificent Monday!   In fact, I hope it’s  PERFICK.  ♥  love  ♥ ~

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A Frosty Nights Seasons Greetings

And the Grinch, with his grinch-feet ice-cold in the snow,
Stood puzzling and puzzling:  “How could it be so?”
“It came with out ribbons! It came without tags!”
“It came without packages, boxes or bags!”
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,”   he thought,  “doesn’t come from a store.”
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

Where I live,  my neighbours and I are surrounded by huge pine trees.  80 feet (plus) tall.  Now I have to admit that I love them, they give my garden some wonderful cool shade in the summer months, and offer protection in the winter.  However there’s a downside to these fabulous trees – because in the autumn and winter months they shed pine needles like crazy and bury all our gardens under a deep carpet of them,  – and they also shed pine cones.

(Which my dog loves!  She sits in the garden, staring up at the trees, waiting for the pine cones to drop, …  and the minute they do, she chases round the garden to collect them and promptly brings them into the house as a present for me.).

I wanted to make Christmas cards for some of my neighbours which had some sort of personal ‘thing’ about them,  so I chose my stamps to include a pine cone  and also a silhouette of a large black cat …  as a representation of one of my cats – who all my neighbours know.

I’m owned by three felines.  One is a very old lady who’s almost 19 years old and the ‘boss’ (and how!) of the trio, and the two others are loveable rascals of two years old who love nothing better than to play Cowboys and Indians at breakneck speed through my cottage!.  One of these youngsters is a beautiful, huge,  luxurious,  black velvet coated beastie, called Alfie.  He’s way too heavy for me to pick up – but not overweight;  long, tall, sleek, powerfully built, adept at walking along the edge of a high fence with such elegance, which makes his muscles ripple like that of a panther.  However, he’s a big softy, who loves a chinny tickle, and who has the teeniest meow you’ve ever heard!

To make this card;  I began by masking off a circle on the card, which was to be the moon, and also masked off where I wanted to put in a snow drift so that it added depth to the card.  I blended three ink pad colours;  two blue Memento Archival Ink pads, and a tiny touch from a black Ranger Archival ink pad.  The photographs haven’t captured the true colours of this card.  The blues are a little darker than they show here, making the whole scene very much like the sky at midnight, on Christmas Eve.

Once the sky and snow drifts were in place I then went straight into stamping:    I Stamped the Pine trees on the snow drift, and then the crescent wreath shape, using the second generation stamping method which I’ve talked previously about in the Christmas cards which I posted about over the past few days.

a section of the card, in close up, to show the second generation stamping method. (click on photograph and it will open up, in a much larger size, but remember to click ‘back’ on your browser window so that you come back to this post to continue reading).

I wanted to add a tiny bit of colour , so stamped some small red flowers to represent Christmas Poinsettia flowers, and stamped the pine cones in a dry brown colour.

Next came the Seasons Greetings sentiment – which I wanted to be in gilding flakes, so I stamped the words using  Cosmic Shimmer Flake and Glitter Glue,  and then used Cosmic Shimmer Gilding Flakes to gild the stamped words.

Following this I added some glitter to the snow drift and the wreath, using a fine nibbed glue pen and Wow glitters;  and then used a Graph It white marker pen to add snow ‘dots’ falling against the dark sky,  and also added  ‘snow’ onto some of the branches of the wreath, where snow would have settled naturally.

And that’s all there is to it! 

I had fun with this card – and I have to admit that I really love the finished article.

Thanks for stopping by and sharing a few minutes of your day with me.  I’ve loved have your company.

Have a truly fabulous, blessed,  rest of your day.